With all the wind in rain here in the San Francisco Bay area I was checking out my favorite weather site, Wunderground.com, to see how much rain we have had. For San Jose, we got a lot. At my house, I’m one of those folks with a weather station, we had 3.57 inches in less than one day. At my brothers house in Scotts Valley, they had over six inches in one day. I guess you could say, lots of puddles.

3D Radar

Anyhow, the reason for this post was to let you know about this cool new radar Wunderground is testing out.  Besides seeing where the rain clouds are from up above, you can now see them in 3D. Check out this screenshot I took.

The green and yellow indicate rain, and clouds are not visible. Navigation through this is pretty cool as well. To see the radar you enter a 3D environment created by Unity. By just pointing where you want to go with your mouse, and using a few keyboard commands you fly through your surroundings. You almost feel like you could be a weather man, or at least be his video technology support guy.

It does have one annoying feature I don’t like, but this is beta. The problem is that I often want to keep my perspective, but want to move my mouse off the 3D screen. The Unity software follows you no matter where your mouse is. It’s basically on, or you not on that page anymore.

Give It a Try

To try out the radar go to the Wunderground 3D Radar. Make sure you scroll down a little before you use it. There are some quick and easy directions, and a place to specifically enter in a location.

Final Note: It crashed my FF version 3.5 using Windows XP a few times, just while writing this post. The crash occurred when I tried navigating away from the page.

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